Searching for Understanding

29 Mar 2011

There is a great human curiosity that tracks across the ages, across people, a yearning to say what is what and why. But it is nowhere more magnificent than in the individual, in his life.

The young man today, living in a world with millennia of human history, is on a journey from a young age of unlocking not only his own secrets but the secrets of those before him. He wants to invent himself into a world of possibilities, to create his life. But he is not the first, not the second; the origin of his story escapes his memory and his father’s, escapes recorded memory. And yet, the space within which he can do his work of invention is confined. People have shaped, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident, a world in which he must find a way to operate. On some fronts, he must invent against the grain, but on so many his path is pre-arranged. Not in a grand cosmic sense, and not necessarily in the sense that he has no options, no choice.

His wonderful realization, as he goes, is that the boundaries left in place by human time do not really collapse his possibilities. The roads and buildings and plans and books and schools and governments and recipes and songs and poems and tendencies left for him and his fellows were left there by people who, he believes, shared a belief that the messy human struggle toward… something… is somehow worthwhile. These building blocks which may appear as impediments to creativity are imbued, instead, with a sense of focus and purpose. Created by people who in some part of themselves believed that these were the things needed to make their own lives livable. Structures that have, with time, become facts. Man-made raw materials for a future understanding.